Description

　　As a Principal Scientist within Alexa, you are a trusted part of the technical leadership. You bring business and industry context to science and technology decisions. You set the standard for scientific excellence and make decisions that affect the way we build and integrate algorithms. You solicit differing views across the organization and are willing to change your mind as you learn more. Your artifacts are exemplary and often used as reference across organization.

　　You are a hands-on scientific leader. Your solutions are exemplary in terms of algorithm design, clarity, model structure, efficiency, and extensibility. You tackle intrinsically hard problems, acquiring expertise as needed. You decompose complex problems into straightforward solutions.

　　You amplify your impact by leading scientific reviews within your organization or at your location. You scrutinize and review experimental design, modeling, verification and other research procedures. You probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, and foster shared understanding. You align teams toward coherent strategies. You educate, keeping the scientific community up to date on advanced techniques, state of the art approaches, the latest technologies, and trends. You help managers guide the career growth of other scientists by mentoring and play a significant role in hiring and developing scientists and leads.

　　We’re looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Principal Scientist to help build industry-leading conversational technologies that customers love. Our mission is to push the envelope in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML), Dialog Management, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and Audio Signal Processing, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers. As a Sr. Principal Artificial Intelligence Scientist, you will work with talented peers to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art in spoken language understanding and dialog systems. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence. You will mentor Principal and Senior scientists, and work in a fast paced team environment. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of novel products and services that make use of speech and language technology.

　　The role will work across teams and areas influencing data, algorithm, system design, and product decisions. Areas of interest cover the whole spectrum of audio and speech processing, and cloud-based and embedded ML solutions, including active learning and semi-/unsupervised learning techniques for acoustic and language modeling, knowledge distillation, learning from heterogeneous and mismatched audio data including data selection/augmentation/simulation, transfer learning, domain adversarial training, variationally autoencoder disentanglement, etc.

　　You will also help drive scalable, robust, and automated solutions, leading scientists to make new algorithms and processes scalable to work on production-scale data sizes and achieving fully automated adaptation of processes and algorithms to new environments and locales. You will also lead integration of new algorithms and processes into existing modeling stacks, simplify and streamline the existing modeling stacks, and develop testing and evaluation strategies. You will influence design and architecture of software stacks used offline and at runtime for building and deploying model artifacts, achieving flexible yet efficient solutions suitable for R&D work and for running in production. You will mentor scientists and review scientific work in other organizations to raise the bar of scientific research within Amazon.

　　Key job responsibilities

　　You will be responsible for defining key research directions, adopting or inventing new machine learning techniques, conducting rigorous experiments, publishing results, and ensuring that research is translated into practice. You will develop long-term strategies, persuade teams to adopt those strategies, propose goals and deliver on them. You will also participate in organizational planning, hiring, mentorship and leadership development. You will be technically fearless and with a passion for building scalable science and engineering solutions. You will serve as a key scientific resource in full-cycle development (conception, design, implementation, testing to documentation, delivery, and maintenance).

　　About the team

　　Alexa is the groundbreaking cloud-based intelligent agent that powers Echo and other devices designed around your voice. Our team is creating the science and technology behind Alexa. We’re working hard, having fun, and making history. Come join our team! You will have an enormous opportunity to impact the customer experience, design, architecture, and implementation of a cutting edge product used every day by people you know.

　　We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations:

　　Sunnyvale, CA, USA

　　Basic Qualifications

　　PhD with specialization in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, or computational cognitive science

　　10+ years of combined academic and research experience.

　　Strong publication record in top-tier journals and conferences.

　　Functional thought leader, sought after for key tech decisions. Can successfully sell ideas to an executive level decision maker.

　　Mentors and trains the research scientist community on complex technical issues.

　　Experience developing software in traditional programming languages (C++, Java, etc..).

　　Excellent written and spoken communication skills

　　Preferred Qualifications

　　Strong software development skills

　　Experience working effectively with science, data processing, and software engineering teams

　　Proven track record of innovation in creating novel algorithms and advancing the state of the art

　　Entrepreneurial spirit combined with strong architectural and problem solving skills

　　Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.

　　Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $159,100/year in our lowest geographic market up to $309,400/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.